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Comment by kkjjkgjjgg | Hacker News Reader

"In this particular situation, it seems like the only purpose of college is to create arbitrary classist hurdles for poor people to jump through."

There are certainly a lot of useless majors. But that doesn't imply all of them are useless.

"the fact that educational debt in America can never be voided through bankruptcy seems like a conscious systemic decision to create debt slaves."

I'm not in the US, but isn't the rationale for that construct to make people more credit worthy? Ultimately you have to convince somebody to give a random person a lot of money on the odd chance that they'll finish their education and earn the money back. I suppose if you don't like "educational debt", you could also try to convince somebody to give you another type of loan.

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> There are certainly a lot of useless majors. But that doesn't imply all of them are useless.

It's not so much a critique of the majors but rather the professional requirements of the job listing. For jobs that don't have an innate technical (technical in the loosest sense of the term) requirement, they only want a certain class of person working there and college degrees are just how they do that.

> I'm not in the US, but isn't the rationale for that construct to make people more credit worthy? Ultimately you have to convince somebody to give a random person a lot of money on the odd chance that they'll finish their education and earn the money back. I suppose if you don't like "educational debt", you could also try to convince somebody to give you another type of loan.

One rationale that I heard that seems reasonable at face value is since you can't give back your education, that's the justification for not being able to declare bankruptcy.

I mean, I could put it on credit cards or take a personal loan, but that just increases the financial burden (via the interest rate), and if I'm not going to do that for the explicit purpose of purposely declaring bankruptcy, it seems unnecessary.

> One rationale that I heard that seems reasonable at face value is since you can't give back your education, that's the justification for not being able to declare bankruptcy.

It goes a little further than that. It doesn't really matter that you can't give back the education. It's that the loan is entirely unsecured - there's no collateral, but also the people who get student loans typically don't have any assets. So it would cost nothing to take out student loans, study, and then declare bankruptcy.

If that were the case though, why wouldn't that apply to credit card debt?

It does. That's why my first credit card had a limit of $800. It eventually rose all the way to $1400.

I can't reply directly to the poster who asked:

> why wouldn't that apply to credit card debt?

So I'll just leave an answer here. Credit cards, when they are issued to college-aged kids with little to no income or assets, are typically issued with very small credit lines (i.e. we're talking much smaller amounts than students loans) and/or require a co-signer, like a parent with an established credit history.

>It's not so much a critique of the majors but rather the professional requirements of the job listing. For jobs that don't have an innate technical (technical in the loosest sense of the term) requirement, they only want a certain class of person working there and college degrees are just how they do that.

I'd go further and suggest that many of these jobs only really exist to save face for the underperforming children of the upper-middle classes.

Realistically, employers are simply seeking to reduce the number of applicants down to manageable levels. When you have 1,000 people lined up at the door for a job, you cannot meaningfully evaluate them all and need to find a mechanism to quickly eliminate most of them.

You also need a method is deemed legally acceptable. Throwing out all the resumes of women, for example, could land you in some legal hot water. Degrees are one of the few filters that is deemed legally acceptable. It's there to keep the lawyers happy and little else.

> reasonable at face value is since you can't give back your education, that's the justification for not being able to declare bankruptcy

At face value, yes, but in the real world if you're not earning enough after 10 years to pay it down, it was a bad investment. Allowing bankruptcy after the passing of a few year's time is a way of notifying lenders, who should be the more sophisticated party to the transaction, that if the career investment fails to pan out, they take a loss.

That would work, except that politics become involved, so it doesn't.

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